Alan Hicks

France accuses Iran of supermarket fridge hacking bbc.in/4zgy9PL

Brexit has been catastrophic. It's time to rejoin the EU. standard.co.uk/news/politics…

🚨 BREAKING: Andy Burnham says he will limit non-compete clauses in employment contracts "Non-compete clauses will no longer be a barrier to hiring for our most promising start-ups"

What makes a great contemporary American conservative political speech to my European ears, exhibit 1: JD Vance at Munich, ruthless, direct, insulting, bad-faith, impossible to ignore (1/x)

Congratulations to the winners of this year’s @TfL In Bloom awards - a fantastic example of how we can bring nature to even the smallest spaces. From fruit and veg patches to award-winning flower displays, these projects are turning stations and transport offices into little pockets of greenery for everyone to enjoy. london-now.co.uk/news/265830…

Iran Strikes On Amazon Data Centers Caused Permanent Loss of Customer Data ift.tt/4FyXEBZ

EN DIRECT | Bâtissons les États-Unis d'Europe. xitter.gq/i/broadcasts/1OxwbnOqB…

Instagram suspended their account over this!!! globalnews.ca/news/12042513/…

A whole AI coding team that built a platform end to end got laid off mid-project, leaving QA to file bugs into an empty group chat. { author: @levelksk } dev.to/xulingfeng/the-person…

250 years after July 4, 1776, the successor of King George III pays taxes and publishes his returns. The successor of George Washington does not. bbc.com/news/articles/c8x215…

The words that come into my head when I think about Andy Burnham as prime-minister-in-waiting are “president” and “Boris Johnson.” As I said on News at Ten last night, his ambition to transfer significant financial and policy powers from Westminster to the regions - mayors and local government - would weaken the power of his cabinet while enhancing his, with his planned Downing Street North as overseer of this distributed power. This is redolent of French or American separation of presidential/executive, parliamentary and state/municipal powers more than the British tradition. It may be a good thing. It may be the sine qua non of narrowing the wealth and income gaps between London/south-east and the rest of the UK. But we do not have a directly elected president. And even if this kind of constitutional change bores you to tears, it matters: we’ve had a parliamentary system that has muddled through for 250 years, give or take. Although it may make very good sense to end the near absolute power of centralising Westminster departments and their often ove-confident secretaries of state, while transferring vital economic decisions to elected mayors or councillors who know what their communities actually need, it is not so conspicuously the case that MPs themselves need cutting down to size. They should think hard about what kind of role they want in this new system of newly distributed power. There is a case for saying they - in some kind of British version of American confessional committees - should have more oversight over Burnham’s much expanded Office of the Prime Minister, mayors and economic regulators. If they don’t hold the new quasi presidential system to account, who would - especially when so much of Burnham’s personal authority will flow from a presidential style of talking to and directly connecting with voters? Which brings me to the Boris Johnson echoes. They are that First, Tory MPs saw him - just as Labour MPs see Burnham - as some kind of election winning messiah. Second, Johnson talked an incessant talk of narrowing the gap between north and south, which he called “levelling up”, his version of Burnham’s “Manchesterism” - but no serious transfer of decision making to local people ever accompanied “levelling up”, and most would say it was hot air Third, Johnson - like Burnham - exploited his figurehead status as a former mayor, his popularity and a personal connection with voters that he ruthlessly cultivated. In Johnson’s case, he capitalised on all that to call a snap general election, which he won handsomely, more than two years before he needed to do so - and it is not far-fetched to say that Burnham will also feel the siren call of securing a personal mandate from the electorate (whether he executes on that or not). I don’t know whether Johnson is a model, or a warning or an augury of things to come. But if Burnham and Labour MPs need a lesson in what can go disastrously wrong when a leader is chosen mid term in a tide of messianic fervour, they have access to a case study whose consequences are still being played out.

Sony is making what is, perhaps, the best case I have ever seen for pirating movies. Did you purchase “Terminator 2”, “Evil Dead”, or “Hot Fuzz” on your PlayStation? Tough luck. You can’t watch those anymore. “You will own nothing, and you’ll be happy.” playstation.com/en-gb/legal/…

Mistral CEO Arthur Mensch walked into the French parliament this week and told lawmakers Europe has exactly two years to build independent AI infrastructure or hand over one trillion dollars in spending to American tech companies. The math he laid out should be front-page news. This is not a technology story. It is a macroeconomic one. Global wages are fifty trillion dollars. AI will cost around ten percent of that. Europe's share is nine trillion. Which means over one trillion dollars in AI spending over the next five years flowing somewhere. Europe already sends 250 billion dollars a year to the US in digital services. Every dollar that leaves funds American R&D. None of it comes back. Mario Draghi's competitiveness report last year made the same point from a different angle. Europe needs eight hundred billion euros in annual investment just to close its existing productivity gap with the US. AI dependency makes that gap structural. You cannot close a productivity gap when the tool driving productivity is owned by your competitor. Mensch compared it to gas. The same way Europe discovered too late what energy dependence costs in a crisis, it is standing at the same crossroads with AI right now. The compute is being allocated today. The chips are being spoken for today. Europe is watching it happen and calling it a technology debate. It is not. It is a sovereignty one. Watch the full podcast on YouTube at @CNBCi

Heureuse nouvelle pour la liberté et la souveraineté des Européens : l’euro numérique est adopté! Good news for the freedom and sovereignty of Europeans: the digital euro has been adopted!

Another one bites the dust.

This is outrageous and infuriating. On July 13, 2026 Microsoft is intentionally bricking Microsoft Office 2019 for Mac. It's important to note that this is not "Subscription-based Software". This is purchased software. Mac users bought a "permanent" license for Microsoft Office 2019 (for a one-time price of $149.99), with the understanding that they then can use that software forever. But, in a little over a month, Microsoft will be putting that purchased software into "reduced functionality mode"... prohibiting all users from creating new documents or editing existing ones. There is absolutely no excuse for this sort of deeply unethical behavior from @Microsoft.

A neuroscientist who spent 20 years proving that reading on screens damages your brain sat down to read her favorite novel and discovered that the damage had already happened to her. Her name is Maryanne Wolf. She runs the Center for Dyslexia at UCLA and is one of the most cited reading scientists alive. The experiment she ran on herself is sitting inside a book she published in 2018. Here is the one fact that breaks how most people think about reading. Humans were never born to read. Yes, you read that right. There is no reading center in the brain. There is no gene for literacy. Every reader builds a custom circuit inside their own skull by repurposing brain regions that originally evolved for vision, language, and recognizing objects. Wolf calls it the reading brain circuit. The circuit is not a given. It is built by use. And because it is built by use, it can be unbuilt by disuse. The circuit she spent her career mapping is not the one that just turns letters into sounds. Sitting on top of that is something she calls the deep reading circuit. Both hemispheres firing. Multiple lobes coordinating. The visual system, the language regions, the memory centers, the emotional and motor systems all firing in a choreographed sequence that takes the brain a few seconds longer to run than skimming does. Those few extra seconds are where everything important happens. Background knowledge pulls up. Analogies form. Inferences fire. The mind takes the perspective of the character. Critical analysis runs in the background while emotion runs in the foreground. New thoughts get generated on top of the author's thoughts. The decoding is the entry ticket. The deep circuit is the show. Skimming does not fire this circuit. There is no time. In 2018 Wolf ran a private experiment on herself. She decided to reread Hermann Hesse's Magister Ludi, a dense novel she had loved as a young woman. She was the world's leading expert on the reading brain. She assumed her own circuit was intact. It was not. She opened the book and could not get through it. Her words, not mine. She wrote that she hated the book. The sentences felt like snakelike constructions that confuse meaning instead of revealing it. 6She described the experience as someone pouring thick molasses over her brain every time she picked it up. She wrote one sentence that should haunt anyone who reads it. "I now read on the surface and very quickly, in fact, I read too fast to comprehend deeper levels." The woman who built her entire career on the deep reading circuit had quietly lost access to her own. The mechanism is brutal in how simple it is. Eye-tracking research from Ziming Liu at San Jose State shows that when people read on screens, almost all of them fall into the same pattern. They read the first line. Then their eyes word-spot down the page in an F shape. They sample. They do not read. Whatever you stop using, your brain stops maintaining. The data is the part most people have never seen. In 2018 Pablo Delgado ran a meta-analysis of 54 studies covering more than 170,000 participants. Same text. Half on paper. Half on screen. The screen group lost by 0.21 standard deviations. Replicated by Clinton at 0.25. Replicated by Kong at 0.21. Researchers gave it a name. They call it the screen inferiority effect. The worst part is what happened over time. The gap has grown larger in studies done after 2010, not smaller. Digital natives do not outperform older readers. They underperform them on the same texts. More exposure makes it worse, not better. Screen readers are also more confident they understood than paper readers. They think they got more out of the text than they actually did. The skimmer does not know they are skimming. They believe they are reading. The stakes Wolf keeps coming back to are not academic. The deep reading circuit is the same circuit your brain uses to take another person's perspective. To weigh complex civic information. To read a contract, a ballot question, a medical disclosure and notice what is actually being said underneath what is written. If the circuit atrophies, those capacities go with it. Not metaphorically. Structurally. You are not getting dumber. You are not losing intelligence. You are quietly losing access to a specific circuit that takes longer to fire than your phone is willing to wait for. The expert who spent 20 years warning the world ran the experiment on herself and barely made it back. Most people are not running the experiment at all.